engravings on the walls, and "pretty things" all scattered about; as pleasant a room as one could wish to sit

in on a wet day. Its inmates, women of various ages, neatly dressed, and each busy about something or other, welcomed us with smiling courtesy.

"It is one of the rules of the house," Miss Skinner told me afterward, "that everybody should show to new-comers or accidental visitors the same politeness she would think necessary in a house of her own."

Some of these girls looked healthy and bright, others sickly and sad; but all were ready to talk and be pleasant. I noticed that they were all addressed as "Miss So-and-so,' except when, as not seldom happened, one of the ladies called them "dear," at which their faces always brightened up. The sweet word was not thrown away--loving-kindness never is. How many a forlorn worker may have had her heart warmed and strengthened by the motherly tenderness found in this House of Rest!

Its interior and invisible arrangements were equal to the visible. The bedrooms when small had only one bed-at most two; but the larger ones were subdivided into four by the simple device of two iron bars crossing in the center, upon which curtains run-thus secluding safely each little bed, washstand, table, and box for clothes. Every room was painted a different color, and called thence "the peacock room, "the blue room," "the pink room.” The earthenware was also varied and Pretty; in short, every pains was taken to make the House of Rest as little as possible like a House of Detention or House of Correc

tion, which many such practically are.

"Will you be surprised to learn,” said Miss Skinner, with a smile, that we not only allow, we actually encourage dancing, singing, and acting of charades? We give picnics on the sands, or send our girls boating, with a boatman we can trust. Nay, we even permit excursions up the Dart, and to many other of the lovely places hereabouts. Our guests generally club together and pay their own expenses; if they cannot, we sometimes pay. But not often; for there is in most of them, a stern, even fierce independence, equal to that of Mr. Besant's Melenda. world has dealt so hardly with them that they have grown bitter. They cannot understand how anybody means to be kind to them-above all, why my sister and I should do so much for them, when we get nothing by it."

The

Is not this the very lesson that our democratic age requires the personal help, the personal sympathy between rich and poor, which does more good than any amount of money? I inquired which class of female workers she considered the "best off," in all senses.

"Decidedly the telegraph and post-office clerks. They are better educated, to begin with, and more healthy, both because their work is healthier, and because the rooms they work in have, thanks to Mr. Fawcett, all sanitary appliances. His interest in them and his care over them ended but with his life. But with the West-End, and especially the East-End shopkeepers, it is very different. I could tell you things my girls have told me, that would wring your heart."

But she did not, and does not, tell -which accounts for the girls' confidence in her. Only by urging the usefulness of my purpose, for which an ounce of fact was worth a cartload of fiction, did she give me, anonymously, some out of many data-notes made by herself at the time proving that Mr. Besant has not overdrawn his picture, as SO many are inclined to think. I set the cases down, unembellished and nameless:

"A-, Mantle-maker in a large establishment. Wages 98. per week, latterly only 78. 6d., work being slack. Pays 38. 6d. for rooms, 18. for coal, lamp-oil, and fire-wood, 9d. for washing, which leaves just 38. 9d. for food and clothing. Lives mostly on bread and tea; carries breadand-butter for her dinner to her place of business, as it takes her three hours to walk there and back. A kind forewoman paid for her coming to the House of Rest. She is a pretty, graceful girl of twenty. She said once, with a sigh, 'It is so hard to keep respectable!' One of the plush mantles she made was for the Princess of Wales, value £30. (Good heavens! if that sweet, gentle Princess, the mother of young daughters, had known this history when she put it on!)

"Bis a bodice hand. After five years' experience earns 8s a week. Says simply, Often I don't get quite enough to eat. Has no parents; boards with a step-mother. Her sister earns only 68. 6d. a week. They have hard work to get decent clothes; and the town they live in, a gay watering-place, makes it difficult to keep respectable.

"C- was a girl strongly like Melenda, pale and fierce-looking. She had been long out of work with pleurisy and an injured limb. Lives mostly on tea. When quite well (if ever) she rises at 5.30 A.M.,

and goes to bel at midnight. She too is

an orphan, alone in the world.

"Da mantle-cutter. Cloth so heavy to lift that she strained her back, result being acate neuralgia of the spine. She had an in alid sister to support, and her regular work only lasts through eight months of the year."

Ordinarily, neither sick people nor convalescents are taken at the House of Rest, which is meant for a holiday-house, to prevent illness, not cure it. But sometimes invalids

come threatened with that almost universal Scourge, consumption. "We all of us have something more or less wrong with our lungs," said one girl. And no wonder. In a house, which is one of the largest establishments in London, the workroom is only lighted by a skylight, bitterly cold in winter, "baking hot" in summer. Sixty women work in it, and it is warmed by one small stove. Another, a provincial workroom, where fifteen sit daily, has no means of fire at all. When cold, they light the gas, and there is no ventilation of any sort.

Case after case might be set down, with the girls' own simple words to illustrate it. "All trees, and birds singing, and no people!" exclaimed in delight one who had spent her life in the East-End of London, and never had a country holiday before. "In eleven months and a fortnight I will be back again," said another, "and I'll put by a penny a-week for going up the Dart." This girl, a bookbinder, with parents to keep, would after all have lost her holiday, for she spent all the money laid up for it over her sick father, had not a kind lady given her the sum required, and she came.

E- and F were worse off than she. E- had never had a

holiday, except for three days, in her whole life, and seemed absolutely stupefied with work. F had stood in a shop for six years without rest, and had never seen the sea before. She was a girl with little or no education, yet had set her face

as a flint against much immorality that she saw around her in the said shop, and held to the right with a marvellous steadfastness.

This is the great terror haunting these poor girls, who as a class are "respectable" and desire to keep so. There are worse things before them than mere dying. Of the thousand women who in ten years have visited the House of Rest, and whose after career has been, as usual, silently watched by their friends there, many, only too many, have died; but only one has, to use the customary and most pathetic word, "fallen."

To keep them safe from falling, to give them innocent pleasures for guilty ones-young people must have pleasure, in some form or other-to offer them a higher ideal of life, wholesome interests, and cheerful companionships, which often ripen into beneficial friendships, is the aim of the Babbacombe House of Rest. It does not profess to cure the sick, or reclaim the wicked; it goes on the principle that "prevention is better than cure," and that to guide people into the right way is safer and more efficacious than to snatch them out of the wrong one. It is meant principally as a holidayhome, small enough to allow its promoters individual knowledge of the inmates. They find out what each likes best, and help her to it, so that she may go back to work strengthened and refreshed.

The more so, as this yearly holiday is to many girls their most dangerous time. Having saved up for it throughout the year, they are bent on enjoying it to the full while it lasts. They spend their money, often very recklessly; make acquaintances not always creditable; and this

brief taste of the life of enjoyment makes more intolerable than ever the life of work. They loathe it, and see ever before them the one ghastly means of escaping from it which the world offers to its starving surplus women. If the happy women, fulfilling their natural duties as wives and mothers, and the not unhappy single women, who have found their work and do it, and whose influence often radiates far wider than that of any married woman, would only try to help their sisters before they fall! There are many ways of doing this. First, by only dealing at shops where they know the employees are well treated, as in many cases they are. Out of London, and in the provinces, where the discomfort and disregard of all sanitary care is much worse than in the metropolis, there are still many admirable exceptions.

A second form of help is the very simple one I named at the beginning of this paper-that any lady who gives garden-parties should give just one a-year to guests who cannot return it, but who will enjoy it to an extent she can hardly imagine. And thirdly, that any other lady who is anxious to do good, but really does not know how to do it-since to go and live for three months at Hoxton, after the fashion of Mr. Besant's heroine, would only be possible in fiction-may assist chers to do good by communicating with the Misses Skinner at Babbacombe.

I wish I could draw a picture of the House of Rest as I saw it next morning-a thorough spring morning-sitting on the cliff-top, with the sunshiny sea glittering at my feet, and the curve of coast, with its various combes, or valleys—Oddi

ciates the elements necessary to make up the art of what he calls true portraiture. In a word, I believe that he completely misses the vital essence of tragedy, and that his criticism is of the earth earthy.

It is hardly within the scope of this note that I should discusss with M. Coquelin as to how far the resources of a comedian may be suitable for tragic parts. There seems to be a deep-rooted conviction in his mind that the qualities which enable an actor to observe certain types of character, and to embody their salient features in a consistent whole, will invariably enable him to scale the heights of the poetic drama. But the most odd feature of this assumption is his labor to prove that an actor must give to each character a separate physiological maintenance, so that every fresh impersonation may begin the world with a new voice and a new body. That an artist, with an individuality so marked as M. Coquelin's, should imagine that his identity can be entirely lost seems singular. It must be granted that this art of transformation, even in part, is of great importance in that large range of the drama where M. Coquelin is quite at home, and where the purely mimetic faculty has its chief significance. When, however, we are asked to believe that the representation of a great tragic part depends on the simulation of a physical apparatus which the actor has not previously exhibited, we must seek refuge in a respectful incredulity. It would almost seem as if M. Coquelin, in the midst of his dissertation on the significance of a wrinkle, had lost sight of the fact that in tragedy and the poetic drama it is rather the

soul of the artist than his form which is moulded by the theme. Edmund Kean sometimes passed from one part to another with little more external variation than was suggested by a corked mustache; but the poetry, the intensity, the fiery passion of the man, made his acting the most real and vivid impersonation that his contemporaries had seen. M. Coquelin perhaps takes it for granted that the actress is exempt from the burden of change-the perpetual metamorphosis-to which he dooms the actor. If there be no such exemption, then the task of the artist who must vary her face and figure for Rosalind, Juliet, and Imogen is likely to become unpopular. What did Rachel owe to any transformation of physique? She, as M. Coquelin must be well aware, was the most trained actress of her time. She knew all that Samson could teach; she spared no elaboration of art; but all this experience and labor would have counted for little without the divine fire which made her so great. This electric quality is the rarest and the highest gift the actor can possess. It is a quality which, in varying degrees, distinguishes those who tread the highest walks in the drama, and which has given fame to-day to Salvini, Barnay, Booth, and Mounet-Sully.

When M. Coquelin maintains that an actor should never exhibit real emotion, he is treading old and disputed ground. It matters little whether the player shed tears or not, so long as he can make his audience shed them; but if tears can be summoned at his will and subject to his control, it is true art to utilize such a power, and happy is the actor whose sensibility has at once so great